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Thursday, June 23, 2011

The End of the School Year...Finally!

I get jealous when I'm on Twitter and reading about how wonderful everyone's summer vacation is. My daughter is still in school. Her last day is Friday the 24th. Not only that, but her teacher is still giving the first grade class homework to do every night. A. Lot. Of. Homework. There's been 6 or 7 worksheets a night to do. It's been crazy.

My daughter has been a good sport about doing them, but I haven't been as good a sport. I really thought they were getting the last week off from homework, so I wasn't mentally prepared for this! I don't think I'm the only one. I was talking to a mom of a classmate of my daughter. The mom had offered her daughter to do her homework one night this week. She said her daughter was horrified and declined the offer! She also "corrected" one of the pages of her daughter's homework by turning all the minus signs to plus signs because her daughter accidentally added everything instead of subtracted everything. She didn't want to make her daughter redo the homework, so presto--problem solved!

I like her methods. The teachers had to turn in the kids' grades last week, so they're not really being graded on their homework this week. I would never do that though. I don't have the guts. There should only be one more night of homework anyway! Whew!

8 comments:

I have a friend who, when her son was in kindergarten, just didn't have him do his homework at all. She just didn't do it. I was aghast. There were no repercussions. I have been a rule follower since I was in school so just not doing homework was completely shocking to me.

Research has shown that homework at elementary has no correlation with how well children perform in school. In fact, too much homework can actually cause children's grades and performance as well as attitude towards school and learning fall. Homework should be given as a means to develop good study habits, but no more than 10 minutes total a day. Her teacher needs to do some research on best practices!

Homework at this point is ridiculous. The teacher is not going to grade it. Perhaps she/he just wants to justify the extra photocopies that were made earlier this year? Even at Ian's school, which is an enriched studies magnet school, where he takes all honors courses, there has been no homework. I refer to the days after the grades are in as "junk days", where the only thing going on is socialization and babysitting. Ian knows that I'm not requiring him to attend these days, but since his friends are going, it's an excellent time for some last minute socialization and gathering of phone numbers and email addresses for the summer. I, like you, am anxious for him to be out of school so we can start playing!

I am not a big homework fan in general, but the kids do get graded on whether they turn it in on time. I've never done my kids work for them but I did let the kindergarten homework slide the last 2 weeks of school. Report cards were done by that point and we were all tired of the whole school thing.